As a kid of color, I’ll admit that I sometimes felt jealous of my white classmates who got to draw pictures of themselves and their families with Crayola’s famous “peach” color, which literally used to be called “flesh.” While I made do with “brown,” it never really matched my skin tone—to be honest, peach didn’t really match many of my white classmates’ skin tones either.
And so to me it made a lot of sense when Crayola introduced a line of “multicultural” markers. Why not give children of all colors the opportunity to try and depict themselves as accurately as possible? Why should darker kids whose families can’t afford Crayola’s more massive collections of colors be stuck with either “brown” or “black” to draw themselves?
This did not make sense to Fox News. According to the hosts of Fox morning show Fox & Friends, Crayola is “changing the colors of the rainbow” with its multiracial markers. And in the words of conservative pundit Michelle Malkin: “This is pandering—yes—pandering more to liberal parents than it is to kids who really have no need for such things.” Malkin suggested that she “got along just fine with burnt sienna,” and that everyone else can too.
First, I should mention that burnt sienna is one of the colors in the multicultural pack, and that’s fine if a kid decides that’s the best choice for them. But I thought it would also be helpful for people like Malkin to see why just getting by with burnt sienna won’t work for some kids. It may be surprising to Fox News, but not all people of color are colored alike.
